Saturday, April 21, 2012

Vault as an example of extended GD color scales

﻿Some of my readers may be curious about how I realized that the Golden Dawn color scales could be extended in the fashion that I mentioned in last night's post. The answer is pure experience.

In 2000, during the opening days of Bast Temple/BIORC (as we were busy reinventing ourselves from the previous group, the EOEW), I had cause to turn my eyes back to my Golden Dawn studies after taking several years off to deal with the EOEW. One of the studies that I did involved the Vault of the Adepts (the ritual chamber that is necessary for Second Order operations).

At the time, I was restricted to the published Regardie material and the oh-so few notes that I have taken during my time in the IIOGD. So it was from Westcott's lectures about the Vault that I discovered the thread about the idea of mixing color in various sub-sets; the Vault itself can be classified as a specialized sub-set.

Oh, I had also gotten a crash course in the basics of color theory---it happened over a pizza.

After completing my first color study of the Vault, on index cards (the above picture is from that particular round of study), a little voice in the back of my head asked, "Why stop there? Why not continue to extend the use of the color scales further?" So in 2004, when I found myself needing a very exact set of targeting foci, I simply resumed that line of work to create a more specialized sub-set of colors for my own magical purposes.

(I have done several studies of the Vault coloring since the first one---I am about to start a new one as soon as the current college semester is over.)

Of course, one can argue that what I did was merely put together something from a dead bunch of papers. I like to think otherwise, for I belong to that division of the esoteric traditions that believes that published material allows the great Adepts of previous ages to instruct the students of the current age. In my mind, Westcott (thanks to Regardie) spoke to me across the ages and pointed me in the right direction.

Now, all this work I did took place before I saw a complete version of the Book of the Tomb. I was also ignorant of the Westcott Enochian Tablets. Both of which I have looked at with some interest, for I am always curious to see how different my work is from other students of the tradition. Doing this work before learning of such things just proves to me that there is a natural progression to the work that we do in Golden Dawn. This belief is based on pure experience.

About Me

Morgan Drake Eckstein is a novelist and occult writer living in Denver, Colorado. He writes everything from science fiction and urban fantasy to erotica. He graduated from the University of Colorado with two Bachelor degrees (History and Literary Studies). Besides writing, Morgan does photography, book cover and Tarot art, and cartooning. In his spare time, he is an officer of Bast Temple, a small local Golden Dawn lodge in Denver, Colorado (BIORC in the Inner), and writes a monthly newsletter column for the Hearthstone Community Church ("The Open Full Moon People").